WHY DID I GO TO SCHOOL? – – Picture taken sometimes in 2014…whilst still active in the formal learning space of the Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan. It was the penultimate year of my 5-year training to become a Lawyer.
Well, have we retired from learning? Of course not! Much more, we are now fully into it. If it was pertime then due to the ‘unavoidable distraction’ of class and lectures, it is now full time and self-paced.
If it was almost entirely academic then, despite our insistent ardour to make it empirical and practical, it is now majorly applied and reality based.
While I appreciate the persistent and invaluable labours of my lecturers and professors, I must confess that leaving school really brought home and hard many series of lessons and principles we had trained years in the classroom trying to grasp.
Were the years then a waste? Definitely not! Is the certificate worth nothing as many are quick to presume. Certainly most untrue! School was and is still a test environment; that demo version and simulation of life where lessons precede tests and examinations.
Foundations are critical and most of the time laid in school. I am thankful for my foundation at the University of Ibadan. I am the more grateful everyday.
For the disciplines I imbibed and the cultures I developed. For the long nights spent at the largest library in West Africa (Kenneth Dike Library) not studying my course materials, but perusing the thoughts of men who etched a memorial of legendary attainments in dusty old books.
Men ranging from Achebe the literary notable to Lord Denning the legal luminary; Soyinka the Nobel laureate; Erik Eriksson the virtuoso Psychoanalyst; Shakespeare the great, etc. These and many more helped in no small way.
For the friends I met and kept and the convictions I strengthened. For the rules I broke and the legacies I built as opportunity presented itself.
Foremost, for the skills I mastered in my 5 years unbroken stint as a campus journalist and an active student leader!
Learning today is much more impacting and intentional because of those years. I realise afresh daily that lifelong learning is the crux of every impactful life. And that a great work ethic is the base of every lasting achievement.
Those years of hardwork no one sent us are beginning not just to pay off, but have made it easy to dive deeper and more deftly into this labyrinth called life. Truly discipline, diligence, consistency and hardwork pays the best not necessarily in initial engagements, but in their compound effect.
They anchor a life in relevance and renders such life a threat to the continued existence of norms and traditions. Only real and dedicated learners become thinkers. And only thinkers tow the path of the iconoclast. That critical but intelligent divergence.
While we look the future with a renewed hope in the certainty of our never arriving, certainly not at the shore of mastery. There’s no place like that on the map of a person on a mission to forever surpass his best efforts. We can only be lifelong students of an unending growth process!
